>>10947319Everybody who understands the subject can probably agree that natural number arithmetic is useful. It's intuitive, has real world uses, lot's can be (and have been) constructed on top of it. It is in tune with what we see think and feel about things - and numbers. You know you can't agree that some axioms are true and some are not, they are axioms. Peano axioms are consistent, but who says that it's the only consistent system that could be considered a "core" one. And you know, a general opinion hardly makes something a universal truth, this is just adding, ironically, an axiom "this thing is true if enough people believe it".
>if there is no absolute truth to anything, how does anything about math or our life choices make sense?Because you don't really need absolute truths to function. You are still (most probably, this is just an educated guess on my part) a human brain, you feel like doing things, you have programming, chemistry dictates your motivations by a large part. We still operate under the assumption that our world is as we perceive it, and with our instinctual fear of desth, choose to act accordingly.
>then there would be no point discussing mathematics with other people. I could think that 1+1=3 and I'd be equally right with somebody thinking 1+1=2, because only personal truths would exist.Mathematics are still useful to us to do stuff with it, so people strive to calculate things under the same framework to facilitate communication and cooperation. Why? Because we feel the need to. And your example with bending arithmetic is a representation of how new mathematics is made, "but let's suppose that, as nonsensical as it may sound, there IS a square root of -1, lets call it 'i' and see what happens and what can we do with it!" Is literally how complex plane ultimately came to be, it's just taking something and either defining it differently or defining something that otherwise didn't make sense
